Someone famous (I forget who) said, "Color, like light, feeds the soul"? Amen! Finding the color you're after can be a soul journey--as every nuance of color evokes certain associations and responses.
Mike and I had painted my bathroom orange, yellow, turquoise and green. At first, I liked it a lot, then I decided to take away the yellow and go for turquoise on two walls--and it imparts a much more tranquil feeling in the bathroom.
Once upon a time, in 1967, my then-husband and I were living in an apartment on Magnolia Street. We had hardly any money, as he was in the Air Force by day and teaching at San Antonio College at night. We made just enough money to pay for his college loans (he'd just completed an M.F.A.) and rent and payments on our Volkswagen. I was a sophomore in college at the time, and my parents paid for my tuition all four years.
He had a lyrical nude painting over the couch that he'd hauled to Texas from Georgia on top of the VW. He wanted to continue making art, but lacked the money to buy materials. Every day, he'd come home from work and add another few strokes of black ink.
One day an encyclopedia salesman came and tried to sell us a set of books. We knew from the start we weren't going to buy, but he gave us a memorable and entertaining afternoon. "All you're paying for is ink, string, paper and glue," he said.
While he talked, my husband kept adding strokes to the painting, standing back and looking at it through the frame of his hands. The nude figure got more and more rigid in the process, finally looking more like a hulky androgynous figure than a female. Every day he added more black--until, finally, the entire canvas was black.
I often think about that day and that painting. It seems to speak to the tendency to over-do when you have only one canvas. I've done that in other ways:
A few years ago I bought a large mirror, framed in silver ceiling tiles. Over the years, I have painted it so many times that it must weigh a ton in paint. Perfection (satisfaction, at least) eludes me.
I wrote a book once upon a time, too, but by the time it was finished, it was over-edited and revised, and the story itself had changed. The freshness of the original draft was eclipsed by too many changes, too much input--and I lost interest in it.
The process of coloring a page or a wall or a mirror can be exciting--but the final product may or may not ever click. When it does, I feel euphoric. When it doesn't--no matter what anyone else may think--I have to decide whether to try one more time or put it in the closet for a while, just in case a solution shows up.
Usually a nap helps. I saw a notebook at World Market this morning with this on the cover: I feel less guilty about taking a nap if I call it "Pursuing my Dreams."
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